People power - Google has built their business simply by giving the user the most relevant answer to their problem or need. Photograph: John Cogill/AP

We spend a lot of time talking about consumers in the marketing industry. But what exactly is a consumer? To me the name suggests an inanimate object rather than a person who we are clearly trying to understand and engage with. Now we all know what people are; you have relationships with people, people talk to people. But does the same really apply to a consumer?

When we use the word consumer, aren't we already making significant assumptions about the type of relationship involved? More fundamentally it's rather myopic and one dimensional. That is, it's built entirely from the premise of the brand and its objectives. It takes little or no account of the person who you want to buy your product or service and implies that the brand is only interested in the sale.

But that is less and less how things can sustainably work now and in the future. In the brave new frontier that marketing exists in today, we need to reconsider a world where people have much more power in the owner-brand relationship.

We need to strip away the veneer of the consumer and allow people to be at the centre of our thinking. This will enable us to construct a more interesting relationship where we aren't simply after that "one night stand", treating those buying our product as simply a way to get to the next sale. What we need to do is deliver a more meaningful and useful experience to people, one that has a mutual benefit at the heart of the relationship.

That's why it is just as important as ever that we find benefits within products and services that meet a human need. Being humanly relevant is how we can help elevate brands above the mundane, rational and even irrelevant. Human relevance is how we ensure the brand has an emotional context to it. No matter if that brand is B2B or B2P (business to people), it's a person involved in the relationship making the important decision.

Brands that are doing away with the consumer concept have at the heart of their brand, people. Google has built their business simply by giving the user the most relevant answer to their problem or need. They could just as easily have built their solution from a consumer perspective and delivered the answer that was most beneficial to Google, but would they be as successful as they are now if they had?

Take Apple, which carved out a new market for self expression. It has focused on a human ideal, empowering people to express themselves, a market it now owns. The brand brought a new way for people to understand themselves, their lives, and their interactions with each other. This is manifested in iTunes, for example, which allows people to create their unique music imprints.

Even aggregator sites provide a humanly relevant solution. Provide them with some information and in return they offer you a range of solutions that fit your needs and criteria. It's a relationship, formed around the understanding of the needs of people, for example, time saving and money saving, in this case.

The BBC is another example of a brand that has a strong hold on what it intends to be: provide rich content that fits into every part of a person's lifestyle via mediums that are accessible at any time whether on the move or at home. It is also able to suit a range of diverse audiences. The BBC has gathered strong consumer support by engaging with the public's needs. A case in point was its willingness to listen to the social media groundswell when supporters of BBC 6 Music tried to save it from closure.

Tesco in South Korea turned human relevance into consumption by building their home delivery solution around where people are. Built on the insight that people work long hours and some of their downtime is waiting for public transport, Tesco made a QR-based virtual store in the subway.

Airlines are also taking on human-like traits, responding to customers' needs, sometimes pre-emptively. KLM developed a Facebook app to keep customers updated during the ash cloud. It also used social media to monitor and respond to customer issues when they were grounded.

One KLM passenger stranded in Schiphol airport complained on Twitter about not having any water to drink, and within an hour a KLM rep had found him and given him a bottle of water. A simple exercise for KLM but would have made a difference to how that person felt about the brand.

In my view, the success of marketing in the future lies in our ability to build our thinking around people not consumers. By placing human relevance at the heart of the conversation we can form mutually beneficial long-lasting relationships. Long live people.